SkyOS Archive

SkyOS Beta8 was released to testers about week ago to the beta testers, this release focusing on the new networking abilities, the new ISS, and of course the latest patches and programs. I decided to write a quick overview of it, to better expose SkyOS from just an average users point of view.

SkyOS Beta 8 was released last week to beta testers, along with a small patch released a day later to fix some issues (updatable by the SkyOS update system). Beta 8 of course includes re-enabled networking, along with a few networking applications (Gaim and Links, with more to follow). Beta 8 also includes an updated ISS with integrated video (allowing for features such as video preview in viewer window), updated GCC to 3.4.0, Blender 3D CGI application and many bugfixes. Up next: USB.

New Integrated Video system and updated ISS has been completed for beta 8, with a focus on simplicity. Work has been done to integrate everything into the OS, and there are three newjuicyscreenshots showing it all off.

"Yesterday eXpert Zone announced the release of the internal 7.9 beta of SkyOS to a limited amount of "insiders", just to make sure that when beta 8 is released later on to the beta team, the largest bugs would've been squashed. Now, I happened to be one of them lucky few, so here is a quick overview of beta 7.9." Read on for the rest of this overview here.

A new "tour" is available at the SkyOS homepage, showing off what will be available in SkyOS 5.0. Included are many screenshots. This is a good summary of everything that has been done with SkyOS over the past year. In other news Developer Studio, GCC 3.4.0, Binutils 2.15, Make, Python, Autoconf, and many other development tools are new available for SkyOS, as well as Blender3D. The SkyOS community has been busy as well, developing such applications as Personal Organizer (e-mail client/organizer), SkIRC, AFTP, and a few others.

"SkyOS is aimed at the desktop user, the SkyOS team has always stated that SkyOS 5.0 is aimed at the desktop user, but what is a desktop user? In my opinion a desktop user is someone who doesn’t know how the kernel interacts with the graphical interface or how the kernel loads modules. The average desktop user is just that... Average." Read the rest of this editoral here.

SkyOS now has more GTK+ applications to enrich its application base: Gaim and Sylpheed-Claws being the latest ports. The project also made available a beta for their upcoming Software Store. Elsewhere, the SkyOS Monthly newsletter has been released with articles about SkyFS/BeFS and the chances of SkyOS succeeding as a business.

"SkyOS 5.0 Beta 7 has been released for beta testers. The biggest changes in beta 7 are of course the addition of multi-user support and BASH, but many, many small and large bugs have also been fixed as well." Read other news at SkyOS homepage.

After a number of requests from the community, Bash and Coreutils have been ported to SkyOS. With GCC and Make already ported, it will now be much easier to port/compile Unix-compatible applications. In other news, SkyOS 5.0 beta 7 will be available to beta testers on Monday, and will feature, among other things, multi-user support. Elsewhere, Syllable just got a Voodoo3/4/5 driver.

DotGNU has been ported to SkyOS. With help from the developers of DotGNU, the CLI is now available for SkyOS. Compilers, runtimes, and various tools are already fully-functional. Launching C# programs compiled in SkyOS, Windows, or Linux works. DotGNU will be tightly integrated into the system. In progress now: porting of all remaining classes of the mscorlib.

SkyFS has been updated to support the "Securtiy Context", and has now become a full multi-user filesystem. All files can be associated with such security contexts to permit various file operations (read, write, append, list, modify etc.) for all users specified in this security context only. In other news, system-wide controls have been polished up (screenshot available on website), and preliminary translation and support for the Chinese language has been implemented.

After many requests to make SkyOS a multi-user desktop OS, implementation of the "Security Context" management has begun, and is now in working condition (however it is still a "hack" in many ways). In other news, the remaining pre-SkyOS 5.0 widgets are being updated to better fit the WindUI.

Another video of SkyOS 5.0 beta 6 has been released. Due to popular demand, this one is a bit higher quality, and also smaller in size (25MB). A lower-quality version of the same video is also available, weighing in at 8MB. The video shows SkyOS being loaded from Grub, booting up, and being put through general use. It is roughly 6 minutes long.

SkyOS 5.0 beta 6 has been released to all SkyOS beta team members. There are too many changes and improvements to mention them all, but many recent news items are newly available in this beta, including the new ISS, improvements to the GUI, fixed partition manager, sticky notes, new drivers and much more. A few screenshots of beta 6 can be found in this thread on the SkyOS forums.

Video and new screenshots of SkyOS 5.0-beta6 available for download. (MPG, 352x240, ~7min). In other news, the Diff-Filesystem is almost finished. The Diff-Filesystem is a layer between the VFS and any disk's file system. Elsewhere, the Syllable team released experimental new USB drivers.

There is a new review of SkyOS 5.0, complete with a number of screenshots. The review can be found at the new Sky System website. In other SkyOS news, the ISS (Integrated Sound System) is progressing quickly, and Robert has completed and implemented drivers for both the Ensoniq/Creative ES1371 sound cards and VIA vt82xx / AC'97 chipset.